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Placing literary creativity within a changing cultural and political context that saw the end of Margaret Thatcher and rise of New Labour, this book offers fresh interpretations of mainstream and marginal works from all parts of Britain.

In this ground-breaking study, Jonathan Wild investigates the literary history of the Edwardian decade. This period, long overlooked by critics, is revealed as a vibrant cultural era whose writers were determined to break away from the stifling influence of preceding Victorianism.

A groundbreaking re-reading of the literary response to a decade of trauma and transformationThis new study undoes the customary division of the 1940s into the Second World War and after. Instead, it focuses on the thematic preoccupations that emerged from writers' immersion in and resistance to the conflict. Through seven chapters Documenting, Desiring, Killing, Escaping, Grieving, Adjusting and Atomizing the book sets middlebrow and popular writers alongside residual modernists and new voices to reconstruct the literary landscape of the period. Detailed case studies of fiction, drama and poetry provide fresh critical perspectives on writers as diverse as Margery Allingham, Alexander Baron, Elizabeth Bowen, Keith Douglas, Graham Greene, Henry Green, Georgette Heyer, Alun Lewis, Nancy Mitford, George Orwell, Mervyn Peake, J. B. Priestley, Terrence Rattigan, Mary Renault, Stevie Smith, Dylan Thomas and Evelyn Waugh. Arguing that the postwar is a concept that emerges almost simultaneously with the war itself, and that 'peace' is significant only by its absence in an emergent post-Atomic cold war era, this book reclaims the complexity of a decade all too often lost in the fault-lines between pre-war modernism and the emergence of the postmodern. Key Features:Detailed, theoretically informed case studies of canonical writers such as Bowen, Orwell, Greene and WaughDetailed case studies and critical re-evaluations of popular genre writers, and forgotten writers.

The 1980s were a time of tumultuous transition in Britain. While the Cold War was ending, Margaret Thatcher's government reinvented the postwar consensus of Britain's social landscape. This wide-ranging study follows such developments across fiction, poetry, and drama, as well as other cultural forms, such as television, film, and music. It maps changes in society while also paying close attention to literary forms and textures that, by the end of the decade, left Britain a very different place. Specifically, the volume describes the impact of a new generation of London novelists and the affect of feminism, postmodernism, literary theory, working-class reactions to Thatcherism, black British writing, and reflexive and self-conscious modes of writing. Writers discussed include Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Angela Carter, Jeanette Winterson, Salman Rushdie, James Kelman, Fred D'Aguiar, Grace Nichols, and Alan Hollinghurst.

Challenges the myths about apathy and smugness surrounding British literature of the period. Alice Ferrebes lively study rereads the decade and its literature as crucial in twentieth-century British history for its emergent and increasingly complicated politics of difference, as ideas about identity, authority and belonging were tested and contested. By placing a diverse selection of texts alongside those of the established canon of Movement and Angry writing, a literary culture of true diversity and depth is brought into view. The volume characterises the 1950s as a time of confrontation with a range of concerns still avidly debated today, including immigration, education, the challenging behaviour of youth, nuclear threat, the post-industrial and post-imperial legacy, a consumerist economy and a feminist movement hampered by the perceivedly comprehensive nature of its recent success. Contrary to Jimmy Porters defeatist judgement on his era in John Osbornes 1956 play Look Back in Anger, the volume upholds such concerns as good, brave causes indeed.* Timely reassessment of a decade and its literature too often dismissed as apathetic and uninspiring* Comprehensive contextual coverage, situating texts within the wider cultural, literary and social movements of the era* Close-readings of neglected texts interrogate and extend received judgements on creative activity in the period* Tracing of defining themes across genres and national borders provides an innovative and truly inclusive studyKey Words: 1950s literature, politics of difference, Angry Young Men, Movement, literary history

Eclipsed until now by the dominant story of Modernism, a much more inclusive range of 1920s literature emerges freshly illuminated in Chris Baldick's approachable history. The Twenties are reclaimed here as a period with its own distinctive historical awareness and creative agenda, one in which Modernist and non-Modernist currents are shown to engage with common memories and preoccupations. Spanning many genres high and low, including war memoirs, critical essays and detective stories as well as drama, poetry and the novel, Baldick's account situates leading works and authors of the decade - Eliot, Woolf, Lawrence, Huxley, Coward and others - among a rich array of their lesser-known contemporaries to discover common obsessions - especially with the now 'lost' world of pre-War Britain - and shared moods of elegiac despair, nervous frivolity and bold irreverence.

In this ground-breaking study, Jonathan Wild investigates the literary history of the Edwardian decade. This period, long overlooked by critics, is revealed as a vibrant cultural era whose writers were determined to break away from the stifling influence of preceding Victorianism.

This book provides consistently nuanced readings of individual texts as well as a broad view of the whole field of British writing during the period 1930s .